Читать книгу Pushkin - T. Binyon J. - Страница 12

I love thee, Peter’s creation,

Love thy stern, harmonious air,

The Neva’s majestic flow,

The granite of her embankments,

Thy railings’ iron pattern,

Thy pensive nights’

Translucent twilight, moonless glimmer,

When in my room

I write and read without a lamp,

And distinct are the sleeping piles

Of the empty streets, and bright

The Admiralty’s spire,

And, not admitting nocturnal dark

To the golden heavens,

Dawn to replace dusk

Hastens, giving to night but half an hour.

I love your cruel winter’s

Still air and frost,

The flight of sleighs along the broad Neva,

Maidens’ faces brighter than roses,

The brilliance, hubbub and chatter of balls,

And at the bachelor banquet

The hiss of foaming beakers

And the blue flame of punch.

The Bronze Horseman, 43–66

THE PETERSBURG THROUGH WHICH the hero of Eugene Onegin moves in the first chapter of the poem is not fictional: it is the Petersburg of Pushkin. Eugene’s friends and acquaintances, his amusements and diversions, his interests and infatuations are also Pushkin’s. This ‘description of the fashionable life of a St Petersburg young man at the end of 1819, reminiscent of Beppo, sombre Byron’s comic work’,¹ thus provides a skeleton on which to drape a description of Pushkin’s own social life at St Petersburg: his friends and associates, literary salons, the theatre, balls, gambling, liaisons, romances and flirtations.

Rising late, Eugene dons his ‘wide Bolivar’ to saunter up and down ‘the boulevard’ – the shaded walk, lined by two rows of lime trees, which ran down the middle of the Nevsky from the Fontanka canal to the Moika. Warned by his watch that it is around four in the afternoon, he hurries to Talon’s French restaurant on the Nevsky, where Petr Kaverin, the hard-drinking hussar officer who considers cold champagne the best cure for the clap, is waiting. On 27 May 1819 Kaverin noted in his diary: ‘Shcherbinin, Olsufev, Pushkin – supped with me in Petersburg – champagne had been put on ice the day before – by chance my beauty at that time (for the satisfaction of carnal desires) passed by – we called her in – the heat was insupportable – we asked Pushkin to prolong the memory of the evening in verse – here is the result:

A joyful evening in our life

Let us remember, youthful friends;

In the glass goblet champagne’s

Cold stream hissed.

We drank – and Venus with us

Sat sweating at the table.

When shall we four sit again

With whores, wine and pipes?’²

Pushkin had not lost his taste for military company, though now he was as apt to mingle with generals as with subalterns, much to Pushchin’s disapproval. ‘Though liberal in his views, Pushkin had a kind of pathetic habit of betraying his noble character and often angered me and all of us by, for example, loving to consort in the orchestra-pit with Orlov, Chernyshev, Kiselev and others: with patronizing smiles they listened to his jokes and witticisms. If you made him a sign from the stalls, he would run over immediately. You would say to him: “Why do you want, dear chap, to spend your time with that lot; not one of them is sympathetic to you, and so on.” He would listen patiently, begin to tickle you, embrace you, which he usually did when he was slightly flustered. A moment later you would see Pushkin again with the lions of that time!’³ However, something was to be gained from their company. When in 1819 he resurrected the idea of joining the hussars – ‘I’m sorry for poor Pushkin!’ Batyushkov wrote from Naples. ‘He won’t be a good officer, and there will be one good poet less. A terrible loss for poetry! Perchè? Tell me, for God’s sake.’⁴ – General Kiselev promised him a commission. However, Major-General Aleksey Orlov – brother of Mikhail, he had ‘the face of Eros, the figure of the Apollo Belvedere and Herculean muscles’⁵ – dissuaded him from the idea, a service for which Pushkin, on second thoughts, was grateful: ‘Orlov, you are right: I forgo/My hussar dreams/And with Solomon exclaim:/Uniform and sabre – all is vanity!’⁶ Orlov was either extraordinarily magnanimous, or had no knowledge of the epigram Pushkin had devoted to him and his mistress, the ballet-dancer Istomina, in 1817:

Orlov in bed with Istomina

Lay in squalid nudity.

In the heated affair the inconstant general

Had not distinguished himself.

Not intending to insult her dear one,

Laïs took a microscope

And says: ‘Let me see,

My sweet, what you fucked me with.’⁷

Among other new acquaintances a colleague at the Foreign Ministry, Nikolay Krivtsov, was a congenial companion. An officer in the Life Guards Jägers, Krivtsov had lost a leg at the battle of Kulm in 1813, but in England had acquired a cork replacement, so well fashioned as to allow him to dance. Pushkin saw much of him before he was posted to London in March 1818. Bidding him farewell, he gave him a copy of Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans – one of his own favourite works – inscribed ‘To a friend from a friend’,⁸ accompanied by a poem:

When wilt thou press again the hand

Which bestows on thee

For the dull journey and on parting

The Holy Bible of the Charites?^{* 9}

The two shared anti-religious, humanist views: ‘Krivtsov continues to corrupt Pushkin even from London,’ Turgenev told Vyazemsky, who had been posted to Warsaw, ‘and has sent him atheistic verses from pious England.’¹⁰

At this time he got to know two of Lev’s friends: Pavel Nashchokin and Sergey Sobolevsky, the illegitimate son of a well-to-do landowner. Nashchokin was extremely rich, and was an inveterate gambler. His addiction later reduced him to poverty. Though he lived with his mother, he also kept a bachelor apartment in a house on the Fontanka, where his friends, either alone or with a companion, could spend the night. Sobolevsky, tall, and inclined to portliness due to a fondness for good food and drink, was a cynical and witty companion with a flair for turning epigrams. They were to be Pushkin’s closest non-literary friends; perhaps, indeed, his most intimate and trusted friends during the last decade of his life.

Of his fellows at the Lycée Delvig had taken lodgings in Troitsky Lane, which he shared with Yakovlev and the latter’s brother Pavel. Pushkin called here almost daily; together they frequented common eating-houses, or, like the London Mohocks, assaulted the capital’s policemen. Küchelbecker, like Pushkin, had joined the Foreign Ministry, eking out the meagre stipend by teaching at the school for sons of the nobility where Lev and Sobolevsky were pupils. He religiously attended Zhukovsky’s Saturday literary soirées in the latter’s apartment on Ekateringofsky Prospect – Pushkin and Delvig were less regular – and often called at other times to read Zhukovsky his verse. Zhukovsky proffered an original excuse for not attending one social function: ‘My stomach had been upset since the previous evening; in addition Küchelbecker came, so I remained at home,’ he explained.¹¹ Vastly amused by this combination of accidents, Pushkin composed a short verse:

I over-ate at supper,

And Yakov mistakenly locked the door, –

So, my friends, I felt

Both küchelbeckerish and sick!¹²

Insulted, Küchelbecker issued a challenge. They met in the Volkovo cemetery, to the south-east of the city. Delvig, as Küchelbecker’s second, stood to the left of his principal. Küchelbecker was to have the first shot. When he began to aim, Pushkin shouted: ‘Delvig! Stand where I am, it’s safer here.’ Incensed, Küchelbecker made a half-turn, his pistol went off and blew a hole in Delvig’s hat. Pushkin refused to fire, and the quarrel was made up.¹³

He seemed determined to acquire a reputation for belligerence equal to that of his acquaintance Rufin Dorokhov – the model for Dolokhov in War and Peace – an ensign in a carabinier regiment noted for his uncontrolled temper and violent behaviour. At a performance of the opera The Swiss Family at the Bolshoy Theatre on 20 December 1818 he began to hiss one of the actresses. His neighbour, who admired her performance, objected; words were spoken, with Pushkin using ‘indecent language’. Ivan Gorgoli, the head of the St Petersburg police, who was present, intervened. ‘You’re quarrelling, Pushkin! Shouting!’ he said. ‘I would have slapped his face,’ Pushkin replied, ‘and only refrained, lest the actors should take it for applause!’¹⁴

Almost exactly a year later the incident was repeated when Pushkin, bored by a play, interrupted it with hisses and cat-calls. After the performance a Major Denisevich, who had been sitting next to him, took him to task in the corridor, waving his finger at him. Outraged by the gesture, Pushkin demanded Denisevich’s address, and appointed to meet him at eight the following morning. Denisevich was sharing the quarters of Ivan Lazhechnikov, then aide-de-camp to General Count Ostermann-Tolstoy, in the general’s house between the English Embankment and Galernaya Street. At a quarter to eight Pushkin, accompanied by two cavalry officers, appeared and was met by Lazhechnikov. The latter, who was to be acclaimed as ‘the Russian Walter Scott’ for his historical novels The Last Page (1831–3) and The Ice Palace (1835), takes up the story in a letter to Pushkin written eleven years later: ‘Do you remember a morning in Count Ostermann’s house on the Galernaya, with you were two fine young guardsmen, giants in size and spirit, the miserable figure of the Little Russian [Denisevich], who to your question: had you come in time? answered, puffing himself up like a turkey-cock, that he had summoned you not for a chivalrous affair of honour, but to give you a lesson on how to conduct yourself in the theatre and that it was unseemly for a major to fight with a civilian; do you remember the tiny aide-de-camp, laughing heartily at the scene and advising you not to waste honest powder on such vermin and the spur of irony on the skin of an ass. That baby aide-de-camp was your most humble servant.’¹⁵ No wonder that Karamzin’s wife Ekaterina should write to her half-brother, Vyazemsky, in March 1820: ‘Mr Pushkin has duels every day; thank God, not fatal, since the opponents always remain unharmed’,¹⁶ or that Pushkin, in preparation for an occasion when cold steel might be preferred to honest powder, should have attended the school set up in St Petersburg by the famous French fencing master Augustin Grisier.^*

In St Petersburg Pushkin had been reunited with Nikita Kozlov, a serf from Sergey Lvovich’s estate at Boldino, who had looked after him as a child. Nikita became his body-servant, and remained with him until his death. Tall, good-looking, with reddish side-whiskers, he married Nadezhda, Arina Rodionovna’s daughter. Like his master, he was fond of drink. Once, when in liquor, he quarrelled with one of Korff’s servants. Hearing the row, Korff came out and set about Nikita with a stick. Pushkin, feeling that he had been insulted in the person of his servant, called Korff out. Korff refused the challenge with a note: ‘I do not accept your challenge, not because you are Pushkin, but because I am not Küchelbecker.’¹⁷ Pushkin’s way of life aroused a puritanical disgust in Korff:

Beginning while still at the Lycée, he later, in society, abandoned himself to every kind of debauchery and spent days and nights in an uninterrupted succession of bacchanals and orgies, with the most noted and inveterate rakes of the time. It is astonishing how his health and his very talent could withstand such a way of life, with which were naturally associated frequent venereal sicknesses, bringing him at times to the brink of the grave […] Eternally without a copeck, eternally in debt, sometimes even without a decent frock-coat, with endless scandals, frequent duels, closely acquainted with every tavern-keeper, whore and trollop, Pushkin represented a type of the filthiest depravity.¹⁸

The passage, though savagely caricatural, is a recognizable portrait. ‘The Cricket hops around the boulevard and the bordellos,’ Aleksandr Turgenev told Vyazemsky, later referring to his ‘two bouts of a sickness with a non-Russian name’, caught as a result. Once, however, the illness was not that which might have been expected. ‘The poet Pushkin is very ill,’ Turgenev wrote. ‘He caught cold, waiting at the door of a whore, who would not let him in despite the rain, so as not to infect him with her illness. What a battle between generosity and love and licentiousness.’¹⁹ The girl in question might have been the charming Pole, Angelica, who lived with her stout and ugly aunt and a disagreeable little dog on the Moika near Pushchin, also one of her clients.

Intercourse of a different kind was to be had in one of the capital’s salons – that, for instance, of Ekaterina Muraveva, the widow of Mikhail Muravev, a poet and the curator of Moscow University. Nikita, her elder son, was a member of Arzamas and one of the founders of the Union of Salvation; the younger, Aleksandr, a cavalry cornet, joined the conspiracy in 1820. She entertained in a large house on the Fontanka near the Anichkov Bridge, ‘one of the most luxurious and pleasant in the capital’.²⁰ The Karamzins usually stayed here when in St Petersburg, as did Batyushkov, to whom Ekaterina Fedorovna was related by marriage: her husband’s sister had been the poet’s grandmother.

When Batyushkov set out to join the Russian diplomatic mission in Naples on 19 November 1818, she gave a farewell party for him. ‘Yesterday we saw off Batyushkov,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky. ‘Between one and two, before dinner, K.F. Muraveva with her son and niece, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Gnedich, Lunin, Baron Schilling and I drove to Tsarskoe Selo, where a good dinner and a battery of champagne awaited us. We grieved, drank, laughed, argued, grew heated, were ready to weep and drank again. Pushkin wrote an impromptu, which it is impossible to send, and at nine in the evening we sat our dear voyager in his carriage and, sensing a protracted separation, embraced him and took a long farewell of him.’²¹ The first signs of Batyushkov’s mental illness showed themselves in Italy. When he returned to Russia in 1822 he was suffering from persecution mania, which grew ever more severe, and was accompanied by attempts at suicide.

The best-known literary salon in St Petersburg was that of the Olenins. Aleksey Olenin was one of the highest government officials, having replaced Speransky as Imperial Secretary in 1812; he was also president of the Academy of Arts, director of the Public Library, an archaeologist and historian. He was charming and extremely hospitable, as was his wife, Elizaveta Markovna – though she was a chronic invalid who often received her guests lying on a sofa.^* She had inherited a house on the Fontanka near the Semenovsky Bridge: a three-storey building whose entrance columns supported a first-floor balcony; inside the rooms were ornamented with Aleksey Nikolaevich’s collection of antique statues and Etruscan vases. Pushkin was a frequent visitor, both to the St Petersburg house and to Priyutino, the Olenins’ small estate some twelve miles to the north of the capital, and enthusiastically took part in their amateur theatricals. He played Alnaskarov in Khmelnitsky’s one-act comedy Castles in the Air, and, on 2 May 1819, composed together with Zhukovsky a ballad for a charade devised by Ivan Krylov, in honour of Elizaveta Markovna’s birthday. At a party at the Olenins earlier that year, as a forfeit in some game, Krylov – whose satirical fables rival those of La Fontaine – declaimed one of his latest compositions, ‘The Donkey and the Peasant’, before an audience which included Pushkin and an innocent-looking nineteen-year-old beauty, Anna Kern – the daughter of Petr Poltoratsky and hence the niece, both of her hostess and of Praskovya Osipova.

Anna had been married at sixteen – ‘too early and too undiscriminatingly’²² – to Lieutenant-General Ermolay Kern, thirty-five years her senior. Kern, who had lost his command through injudicious behaviour towards a superior officer, had come to St Petersburg in order to petition the emperor for reinstatement. Aware that Alexander was not unsusceptible to Anna’s beauty – which he had compared to that of Princess Charlotte of Prussia, wife of his brother Nicholas – he sent her out to the Fontanka each day in the hope of meeting the emperor, whose habits were well-known: ‘At one in the afternoon he came out of the Winter Palace, walked up the Dvortsovaya Embankment, at Pracheshny Bridge turned down the Fontanka to the Anichkov Bridge […] then returned home by the Nevsky Prospect. The walk was repeated each day, and was called le tour impérial.’²³ ‘This was very disagreeable to me and I froze and walked along annoyed both with myself and with Kern’s insistence,’ Anna wrote.²⁴ Kern’s intelligence sources were at fault, for Anna and the emperor never met.

Enchanted by Krylov’s recital, she noticed no one else. But Pushkin soon forced himself on her attention:

During a further game to my part fell the role of Cleopatra and, as I was holding a basket of flowers, Pushkin, together with my cousin Aleksandr Poltoratsky, came up to me, looked at the basket, and, pointing at my cousin, said: ‘And this gentleman will no doubt play the asp?’ I found that insolent, did not answer and moved away […] At supper Pushkin seated himself behind me, with my cousin, and attempted to gain my attention with flattering exclamations, such as, for example, ‘Can one be allowed to be so pretty!’ There then began a jocular conversation between them on the subject of who was a sinner and who not, who would go to hell and who to heaven. Pushkin said to my cousin: ‘In any case, there will be a lot of pretty women in hell, one will be able to play charades. Ask Mme Kern whether she would like to go to hell.’ I answered very seriously and somewhat drily that I did not wish to go to hell. ‘Well, what do you think now, Pushkin?’ asked my cousin. ‘I have changed my mind,’ the poet replied. ‘I do not want to go to hell, even though there will be pretty women there …’²⁵

Eugene has enjoyed his dinner with Kaverin –

… the cork hit the ceiling,

A stream of the comet year’s wine spurted out,

Before him is bloody roast-beef

And truffles – the luxury of our young years,

The finest flower of French cuisine,

And Strasbourg’s imperishable pie

Between a live Limburg cheese

And a golden pineapple –

(I, xvi)

but it is now half past six, and he hurries to the Bolshoy Theatre, where the performance of a new ballet is beginning.

When Pushkin came to St Petersburg in 1817 the capital’s chief theatre was the Maly (or Kazassi Theatre), a wooden building situated on the south side of the Nevsky near the Anichkov Bridge, in what is now Ostrovsky Square, approximately where the Aleksandrinsky Theatre (designed by Rossi, and built in 1832) stands. On 3 February 1818, however, the Bolshoy (or Kamenny) Theatre, burnt down in 1811, was reopened in Teatralnaya Square in Kolomna, on the site of the present Conservatoire. There was also the German (or Novy) Theatre on Dvortsovaya Square, where a troupe of German actors performed, which existed until the early 1820s. When the Maly Theatre was pulled down at the end of the 1820s, its actors moved for some time to the building of the former circus, near Simeonovsky Bridge on the Fontanka, but this was closed when the Aleksandrinsky Theatre and, a year later, the Mikhailovsky Theatre on Mikhailovskaya Square were opened. In 1827 the wooden Kamennoostrovsky Theatre was built on Kamenny Island, a popular resort for the nobility in the summer months. There was also a theatre, seating four hundred, in the Winter Palace, built by Quarenghi between 1783 and 1787, where performances were given for the royal family and the court, while a number of the richer nobles had small, domestic theatres in their palaces.

The Bolshoy Theatre was huge. Behind the immense colonnade of its portico was a double ramp, enabling carriages to be driven up to the theatre entrance. Immediately inside were a succession of foyers: these, however, were only used when a ball was held at the theatre; they remained empty during the intervals, the audience preferring to circulate in the theatre itself. This consisted of a parterre, above which rose five tiers of boxes and galleries. The vast stage could accommodate several hundred performers at once, and was equipped with the most modern machinery for the production of spectacular effects, which were particularly appreciated by the audience. Performances took place every evening, with the exception of Saturday,^* each performance usually comprising two works: a ballet and a comedy, for example, or an opera and a tragedy.

‘Beneath the shade of the coulisses/My youthful days were spent,’ Pushkin writes in Eugene Onegin (I, xviii). Only unforeseen circumstances could keep him away. When, at the end of October 1819, he arrived late for a performance of the ‘magical ballet’ Hen-Zi and Tao staged by the French ballet master Charles Didelot, it was with the excuse that an exciting event in Tsarskoe Selo had delayed his return. A bear had broken its chain and escaped into the palace gardens where it could have attacked the emperor, had he chanced to be passing. He ended the anecdote with the regretful quip: ‘When a good fellow does turn up, he’s only a bear!’²⁶

In August 1817, during an interval at the Bolshoy, Pushkin was introduced to Pavel Katenin, an officer in the Preobrazhensky Life Guards. Katenin’s regiment left for Moscow shortly afterwards, but when he returned the following summer, Pushkin came to see him: ‘I have come to you as Diogenes came to Antisthenes,’ he said. ‘Beat me, but teach me.’²⁷ ‘Round-faced, with full, red cheeks, like a toy cherub from a Palm Sunday fair’,²⁸ Katenin was a poet, playwright, critic and literary theorist, closer in his views to the Archaic school than that of Karamzin; influential in the theatre, his chief service was to introduce Pushkin into theatrical circles. In early December 1818 he took him to see Prince Shakhovskoy, who lived with his mistress, the comic actress Ekaterina Ezhova, on the upper floor – known as ‘the garret’ – of a house in Srednyaya Podyacheskaya Street. Extraordinarily ugly – he was immensely stout, with a huge, beak-like nose – Shakhovskoy was not only a playwright, but also the repertoire director of the St Petersburg theatres, instructing the performers in acting and declamation. His methods, however, were not to the taste of all. ‘His comic pronunciation with its lisp, his squeaky voice, his sobs, his recitatives, his wails, were all intolerable,’ one actress commented. ‘At the same time he showed one at which line one had to put one’s weight on one’s right foot, with one’s left in the rear, and when one should sway on to one’s left, stretching out the right, which to his mind had a majestic effect. One line had to be said in a whisper, and, after a “pause”, making an “indication” with both hands in the direction of the actor facing one, the last line of the monologue had to be cried out in a rapid gabble.’²⁹ He was, however, extremely charming, and Pushkin, walking back with Katenin after the first meeting, exclaimed: ‘Do you know that at bottom he’s a very good fellow?’, and expressed the hope that he did not know of ‘those schoolboy’s scribblings’: an epigram on him Pushkin had written at the Lycée.³⁰

Shakhovskoy entertained most evenings after the theatre, and Pushkin became a constant visitor to these Bohemian revels, remembering one occasion as ‘one of the best evenings of my life’.³¹ Vasily Pushkin was saddened when he heard of the visits; he remained true to the hostile view of Shakhovskoy taken by Arzamas. ‘Shakhovskoy is still in Moscow,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky in April 1819. ‘He told me that my nephew visited him practically every day. I said nothing, but only sighed quietly.’³² The main attraction of the garret lay perhaps not so much in the personality of the host, as in the presence of young actresses, in whose careers Shakhovskoy took a paternal interest, assisting them not only by instruction in elocution, but also by bringing them together with rich young officers. ‘He is really a good chap, a tolerable author and an excellent pander,’ Pushkin commented to Vyazemsky.³³ In 1825 the playwright Griboedov, another of Pushkin’s colleagues at the Foreign Office, wrote to a friend: ‘For a long time I lived in seclusion from all, then suddenly had an urge to go out into the world, and where should I go, if not to Shakhovskoy’s? There at least one’s bold hand can rove over the swan’s down of sweet bosoms etc.’³⁴

At the garret Pushkin met the nineteen-year-old actress Elena Sosnitskaya, to whose album he contributed a quatrain:

With coldness of heart you have contrived to unite

The wondrous heat of captivating eyes.

He who loves you is, of course, a fool;

But he who loves you not is a hundred times more foolish.³⁵

‘In my youth, when she really was the beautiful Helen,’ he later remarked, ‘I nearly fell into her net, but came to my senses and got off with a poem.’³⁶ He was also seduced by the more mature charms of the singer Nimfodora Semenova, then thirty-one, more renowned for her appearance than her voice: ‘I would wish to be, Semenova, your coverlet,/Or the dog that sleeps upon your bed,’ he sighed.³⁷ More serious was his infatuation – despite the fact that she was thirteen years his senior – with Nimfodora’s elder sister, the tragic actress Ekaterina Semenova. The essay ‘My Remarks on the Russian Theatre’, composed in 1820, though purporting to be a general survey of the state of the theatre, is merely an excuse for praising Semenova. ‘Speaking of Russian tragedy, one speaks of Semenova and, perhaps, only of her. Gifted with talent, beauty, and a lively and true feeling, she formed herself […] Semenova has no rival […] she remains the autocratic queen of the tragic stage.’³⁸ He bestowed the manuscript on her. Somewhat unfeelingly she immediately handed it on to her dramatic mentor, Gnedich, who noted on it: ‘This piece was written by A. Push-kin, when he was pursuing, unsuccessfully, Semenova, who gave it to me then.’³⁹

Semenova had, however, a stage rival: the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra Kolosova, who made her debut at the Bolshoy on 16 December 1818 as Antigone in Ozerov’s tragedy Oedipus in Athens. The following Easter Pushkin, who had admired her demure beauty at the Good Friday service in a church near the Bolshoy, made her acquaintance. But he naturally took Semenova’s side in the rivalry, all the more as he fancied Kolosova had slighted his attentions: she should ‘occupy herself less with aide-de-camps of his imperial majesty and more with her roles’. ‘All fell asleep,’ he added, at a performance of Racine’s Esther (translated by Katenin), on 8 December, in which she took the title role.⁴⁰ ‘Everything in Esther captivates us’ begins an epigram; her speech, her gait, her hair, voice, hand, brows, and ‘her enormous feet!’⁴¹

When Eugene enters the theatre Evdokiya Istomina, the great beauty among the ballet-dancers, is on the stage:

Brilliant, half-ethereal,

Obedient to the violin’s magic bow,

Surrounded by a crowd of nymphs,

Stands Istomina; she

Touching the floor with one foot,

Slowly gyrates the other,

And suddenly jumps, and suddenly flies,

Flies, like fluff from Aeolus’s lips;

Now bends, now straightens,

And with one quick foot the other beats.

(I, xx)

Pushkin pursued her too, but with less zeal than Semenova: he was only one of a crowd of admirers. An amusing sketch, executed by Olenin’s son, Aleksey, shows a scene at Priyutino: a dog, with the head and neck of the dark-haired Istomina, is surrounded by a host of dog admirers with the heads of Pushkin, Gnedich, Krylov and others.⁴²

Another visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret was Nikita Vsevolozhsky, Pushkin’s coeval, a passionate theatre-goer, ‘the best of the momentary friends of my momentary youth’.^{* 43} He was the son of Vsevolod Vsevolozhsky, known, for his wealth, as ‘the Croesus of St Petersburg’, who, after the death of his wife in 1810, had caused a long-lasting scandal in society by taking to live with him a married woman, Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya. The injured husband, Petr Khovansky, complained publicly of the insult done to him, and went so far as to petition the emperor for the return of his wife, but without success. In the end, financially ruined, he was forced to accept Vsevolozhsky’s charity, and lived with the family until his death. To complicate the situation further, Nikita Vsevolozhsky later married Khovansky’s daughter, Princess Varvara. Pushkin, intrigued by the family history, in 1834–5 planned to incorporate it in a projected novel entitled A Russian Pelham. Vsevolozhsky, who received a large income from his father, had an apartment near the Bolshoy and a mistress, the ballet-dancer Evdokiya Ovoshnikova. ‘You remember Pushkin,’ runs a letter of 1824, ‘Pushkin, who sobered you up on Good Friday and led you by the hand to the church of the theatre management so that you could pray to the Lord God and gaze to your heart’s content at Mme Ovoshnikova.’⁴⁴

In March 1819 Vsevolozhsky set up a small theatrical-literary society among his friends. It met fortnightly, in a room at his apartment, and became known as the Green Lamp after the colour of the lamp-shade. Besides Pushkin and Vsevolozhsky the members included Delvig, Nikolay Gnedich, Nikita’s elder brother, Aleksandr, Fedor Glinka, Arkady Rodzyanko, a lieutenant in the Life Guards Jägers, and a poet whose work is an odd mixture of high-minded poems on civic themes and pornographic verse: Pushkin later dubbed him ‘the Piron of the Ukraine’⁴⁵ (a reference to the seventeenth-century French poet Alexis Piron, author of the licentious Ode to Priapus); and another ‘momentary friend’ of this period, Pavel Mansurov, an ensign in the Life Guards Jäger Horse, who, after his marriage to Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya, became Vsevolozhsky’s brother-in-law.^†

The tone of Pushkin’s relationship with Mansurov – and hence with most of the Green Lamp’s members – is conveyed by a verse epistle in which Pushkin urges his ‘bosom friend’ to persevere in his pursuit of the young ballerina Mariya Krylova, then still a pupil at the Theatre Academy, for

soon with happy hand

She will throw off the school uniform,

Will lie down before you on the velvet

And will spread her legs;⁴⁶

and by a letter written to Mansurov after the latter had been posted to Novgorod province:

Are you well, my joy; are you enjoying yourself, my delight – do you remember us, your friends (of the male sex) … We have not forgotten you and at 1/2 past seven every day in the theatre we remember you with applause and sighs – and say: our darling Pavel! What is he doing now in great Novgorod? Envying us – and weeping about Krylova (with the lower orifice, naturally). Each morning the winged maiden^* flies to rehearsal past our Nikita’s windows, as before telescopes rise to her and pricks too – but alas … you cannot see her, she cannot see you. Let’s abandon elegies, my friend. I’ll tell you about us in historical fashion. Everything is as before; the champagne, thank God, is healthy – the actresses too – the one is drunk, the others are fucked – amen, amen. That’s how it ought to be. Yurev’s clap is cured, thank God – I’m developing a small case […] Tolstoy is ill – I won’t say with what – as it is I already have too much clap in my letter. The Green Lamp’s wick needs trimming – it might go out – and that would be a pity – there is oil (i.e. our friend’s champagne).⁴⁷

The note struck here suggests that the Green Lamp was a Russian version of the Hell-fire Club. This was certainly the view taken by earlier biographers of Pushkin, Annenkov, for example, writing: ‘Researches and investigations into this group revealed that it … consisted of nothing more than an orgiastic society.’⁴⁸ Unfortunately, the reality was somewhat less than orgiastic. Though no doubt a good deal of champagne and other wines was consumed during and after the meetings – Küchelbecker puritanically refused to join, ‘on account of the intemperance in the use of drink, which apparently prevailed there’⁴⁹ – and the younger members were in constant pursuit of actresses and ballerinas, the actual proceedings of the society were of a more serious nature.

One of the policies of the Supreme Council of the Union of Welfare was to ‘set up private societies. These, directed by one or two members of the Union, whose existence was not revealed to the societies, did not form part of the Union. No political aim was intended for them, and the only benefit that was hoped for was that, guided by their founders or heads, they could, especially through their activity in literature, art and the like, further the achievement of the aim of the Supreme Council.’⁵⁰ Besides Trubetskoy, three other members of the society were Decembrists: Tolstoy, the usual president at its meetings, Glinka and Tokarev; and there is no doubt that under their direction the Green Lamp became a society of this type. Its name, fortuitously chosen, came to have emblematic significance; Tolstoy, in his deposition to the Committee of Investigation in 1826, remarked that it ‘concealed an ambiguous meaning and the motto of the society consisted of the words: Light and Hope; moreover rings were also made on which a lamp was engraved; each member was obliged to wear one of these rings.’⁵¹ Pushkin used his to seal his letter to Mansurov. Rodzyanko later remarked that at each meeting ‘were read verses against the emperor and against the government’,⁵² and Tolstoy speaks of ‘some republican verses and other fragments’.⁵³ But it was never a political society with a definite programme and specific aims. It was, however, a secret society, in that its existence had not been officially sanctioned, and its members were hence to some extent at risk, given the climate of the time: a fact which brought about its dissolution at the end of 1820.

The meetings usually opened with a review, hastily written by Barkov, of the theatre production its members had witnessed that evening. Then followed contributions from those present. On 17 April 1819, for example, Delvig read his poems ‘Fanny’ – addressed to a prostitute he and Pushkin frequented – and ‘To a Child’; Ulybyshev followed with a political article; a fable by Zhadovsky, two poems by Dolgorukov, and one by Tolstoy ended the proceedings. Only two contributions by Pushkin are listed in the – incomplete – records of the society. Of these the more interesting – and the better poem – is the verse epistle to Vsevolozhsky on the latter’s departure for Moscow, read on 27 November 1819. Urging his friend to avoid high society there, he imagines a far more congenial scene:

In the foaming goblet froths

Ay’s cold stream;

In the thick smoke of lazy pipes,

In dressing-gowns, your new friends

Shout and drink!⁵⁴

Like Arzamas, the Green Lamp provided Pushkin with a ready-made circle of friends, though in the majority of cases his intimacy with them was confined to this period of his life. They were, however, closer to him in age than the Arzamasites, and shared the tastes and predilections which governed his life in these years. Whereas his elder friends sighed over his behaviour and saw him as wasting his talent – Aleksandr Turgenev told Zhukovsky that he daily scolded Pushkin for ‘his laziness and neglect of his own education’, to which ‘he had added a taste for vulgar philandering and equally vulgar eighteenth-century freethinking’⁵⁵ – the members of the Green Lamp were companions in his amusements: drinking, whoring and gambling. As with Arzamas, his loyalty to the group persisted in exile; in 1821 he looked back nostalgically at its meetings:

Do you still burn, our lamp,

Friend of vigils and of feasts?

Do you still foam, golden cup,

In the hands of merry wits?

Are you still the same, friends of mirth,

Friends of Cypris and of verse?

Do the hours of love, the hours of drunkenness

Still fly to the call

Of Freedom, indolence and idleness?⁵⁶

Pushkin’s tastes were not wholly identical with those of Eugene: ‘I am always glad to note the difference/Between Onegin and myself’, he remarks, in case some ‘sarcastic reader’ should imagine that, like Byron, he is painting his own portrait (I, lvi). One vice Eugene did not share was Pushkin’s addiction to gambling.

Passion for bank! neither the love of liberty,

Nor Phoebus, nor friendship, nor feasts

Could have distracted me in past years

From cards.⁵⁷

So he described, in a cancelled stanza of the second chapter of Eugene Onegin, himself during the years in St Petersburg. It was an addiction, moreover, not confined to this period, as he here implies, but which lasted throughout his life. The game to which he was addicted – which was also Casanova’s passion – was bank, also known as faro (or pharo, originally le pharaon) or shtoss, a descendant of lansquenet, the game played by d’Artagnan and the musketeers on the bastion at La Rochelle while under Huguenot fire, and of basset, the favourite card-game at the court of Charles II. Each player chose a card from his pack, placed it either face-up or face-down – in the latter case it was known as a ‘dark’ card – in front of him on the table and set his stake upon it. The banker, taking a fresh pack, turned the cards up from the top, dealing them alternately to his right and left, stopping momentarily if a player called out attendez, in order to make or reconsider a bet. If a card which fell to the right was of the same denomination as one on which a stake had been placed the banker won; he lost, and paid out the amount of the stake, when such a card fell to the left. If both cards exposed in one turn were the same, a player wagering on that denomination lost either half, or the whole of his stake, depending on the rules in force at the game. Having won once, the player could then cock his card – turn up one corner – to wager both his original stake and his gains: this was known as a parolet; or bend the card, to bet only his gains. This was a paix, or parolet-paix, if he had just won a parolet. After winning a parolet, he could cock another corner, to double his winnings again (sept-et-le-va), followed by a third (quinze-et-le-va) and a fourth (trente-et-le-va).⁵⁸

Pushkin gambled constantly, and as constantly lost, as a result having to resort to money-lenders. He played frequently with Nikita Vsevolozhsky, whose deep pockets enabled him to bear his losses. Pushkin, less fortunate, was compelled to stake his manuscripts, and in 1820 lost to Vsevolozhsky a collection of poems which he valued at 1,000 roubles. When, four years later, he was preparing to publish his verse, he employed his brother Lev to buy the manuscript back. Vsevolozhsky generously asked for only 500 roubles in exchange, but Pushkin insisted that the full amount should be paid. ‘The second chapter of “Onegin”/ Modestly slid down [i.e., was lost] upon an ace,’ Ivan Velikopolsky, an old St Petersburg acquaintance, recorded in 1826, adding elsewhere: ‘the long nails of the poet/Are no defence against the misfortunes of play.’⁵⁹ And in December of the same year, when Pushkin was staying at a Pskov inn to recover after having been overturned in a carriage on the road from Mikhailovskoe, he told Vyazemsky that ‘instead of writing the 7th chapter of Onegin, I am losing the fourth at shtoss: it’s not funny’.⁶⁰ Another favourite opponent at the card-table was Vasily Engelhardt, described by Vyazemsky as ‘an extravagant rich man, who did not neglect the pleasures of life, a deep gambler, who, however, during his life seems to have lost more than he won’. ‘Pushkin was very fond of Engelhardt,’ he adds, ‘because he was always ready to play cards, and very felicitously played on words.’⁶¹ In July 1819, having recovered from a serious illness – ‘I have escaped from Aesculapius/Thin and shaven – but alive’ – Pushkin, who was leaving for Mikhailovskoe to convalesce, in a verse epistle begged Engelhardt, ‘Venus’s pious worshipper’, to visit him before his departure.⁶²

The cold he had caught while, as Turgenev reported, standing outside a prostitute’s door, had turned into a more serious illness – it seems likely to have been typhus. On 25 June his uncle wrote from Moscow to Vyazemsky in Warsaw: ‘Pity our poet Pushkin. He is ill with a severe fever. My brother is in despair, and I am extremely concerned by such sad news.’⁶³ James Leighton, the emperor’s personal physician, was called in. He prescribed baths of ice and had Pushkin’s head shaved. After six weeks’ illness Pushkin recovered, but had to wear a wig while his own hair grew again. This was not Pushkin’s only illness, though it was the most severe, during these years in the unhealthy – both in climate and amusements – atmosphere of St Petersburg. Besides a series of venereal infections, he was also seriously ill in January 1818: ‘Our poet Aleksandr was desperately ill, but, thank God, is now better,’ Vasily Pushkin informed Vyazemsky.⁶⁴ During this illness Elizaveta Schott-Schedel, a St Petersburg demi-mondaine, had visited him dressed as an hussar officer, which apparently contributed to his recovery. ‘Was it you, tender maiden, who stood over me/In warrior garb with pleasing gaucherie?’ he wonders, pleading with her to return now he is convalescent:

Appear, enchantress! Let me again glimpse

Beneath the stern shako your heavenly eyes,

And the greatcoat, and the belt of battle,

And the legs adorned with martial boots.⁶⁵

‘Pushkin has taken to his bed,’ Aleksandr Turgenev wrote the following February;⁶⁶ a year later, in February 1820, he was laid up yet again. Unpleasant though the recurrent maladies were, the periods of convalescence that followed afforded him the leisure to read and compose: he can have had little time for either in the frenetic pursuit of pleasure that was his life when healthy. The first eight volumes of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State had come out at the beginning of February 1818. ‘I read them in bed with avidity and attention,’ Pushkin wrote. ‘The appearance of this work (as was fitting) was a great sensation and produced a strong impression. 3,000 copies were sold in a month (Karamzin himself in no way expected this) – a unique happening in our country. Everyone, even society women, rushed to read the History of their Fatherland, previously unknown to them. It was a new revelation for them. Ancient Russia seemed to have been discovered by Karamzin, as America by Columbus.’⁶⁷

The friendship between Pushkin and the Karamzins, begun at Tsarskoe Selo, had continued in St Petersburg. During the winter of 1817–18 he was a frequent visitor to the apartment they had taken in the capital on Zakharevskaya Street; at the end of June 1818 he stayed with them for three days at Peterhof, sketched a portrait of Karamzin, and, with him, Zhukovsky and Aleksandr Turgenev went for a sail on the Gulf of Finland. He was in Peterhof again in the middle of July, and, when the Karamzins moved back to their lodging in Tsarskoe Selo, visited them three times in September. At the beginning of October they took up residence in St Petersburg for the winter, staying this time with Ekaterina Muraveva on the Fontanka. Pushkin visited them soon after their arrival, but then the intimacy suddenly ceased: apart from two short meetings at Tsarskoe Selo in August 1819 there is no trace of any lengthy encounter until the spring of 1820. During this period Pushkin composed a biting epigram on Karamzin’s work:

In his ‘History’ elegance and simplicity

Disinterestedly demonstrate to us

The necessity for autocracy

And the charm of the knout.⁶⁸

Shortly after Karamzin’s death on 22 May 1826 Vyazemsky wrote to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoe: ‘You know the sad cause of my journey to Petersburg. Although you are a knave and have occasionally sinned with epigrams against Karamzin, in order to extract a smile from rascals and cads, without doubt you mourn his death with your heart and mind.’^* ‘Your short letter distresses me for many reasons,’ Pushkin replied on 10 July. ‘Firstly, what do you mean by my epigrams against Karamzin? There was only one, written at a time when Karamzin had put me from himself, deeply wounding both my self-esteem and my heartfelt attachment to him. Even now I cannot think of this without emotion. My epigram was witty and in no way insulting, but the others, as far as I know, were stupid and violent: surely you don’t ascribe them to me? Secondly. Who are you calling rascals and cads? Oh, my dear chap … you hear an accusation and make up your mind without hearing the justification: that’s Jeddart justice. If even Vyazemsky already etc., what about the rest? It’s sad, old man, so sad, one might as well straightaway put one’s head in a noose.’⁶⁹

The ‘rascals and cads’ of Vyazemsky’s letter are the Decembrists. Their trial had opened a month earlier, on 3 June: no wonder he should sadly reproach Vyazemsky for prematurely passing sentence on them. However, as his letter makes clear, though the epigram is a political attack, his rejection by Karamzin was on personal, not political grounds. In April 1820 Karamzin wrote to Dmitriev, ‘Having exhausted all means of knocking sense into his dissolute head, I already long ago abandoned the unfortunate fellow to Fate and to Nemesis.’⁷⁰ What wounded Pushkin so deeply was an unsparing castigation of his follies, followed by banishment into outer darkness.

The performance at the Bolshoy has ended, and Eugene hurries home to change into ‘pantaloons, dress-coat, waistcoat’ (I, xxvi) – probably a brass-buttoned, blue coat with velvet collar and long tails, white waistcoat and blue nankeen pantaloons or tights, buttoning at the ankle – before speeding in a hackney carriage to a ball. This has already begun; the first dance, the polonaise, and the second, the waltz, have taken place; the mazurka, the central event of the ball, is in full swing and will be followed by the final dance, a cotillion.

The ballroom’s full;

The music’s already tired of blaring;

The crowd is busy with the mazurka;

Around it’s noisy and a squash;

The spurs of a Chevalier guardsman jingle;^*

The little feet of darling ladies fly;

After their captivating tracks

Fly fiery glances,

And by the roar of violins are drowned

The jealous whispers of modish wives.

(I, xxviii)

‘In the days of gaieties and desires/I was crazy about balls’ (I, xxix), wrote Pushkin: for the furtherance of amorous intrigue they were supreme. He was simultaneously both highly idealistic and deeply cynical in his view of and attitude towards women. In a letter to his brother, written from Moldavia in 1822, full of sage and prudent injunctions on how Lev should conduct his life – none of which Pushkin himself observed – he remarked: ‘What I have to say to you with regard to women would be perfectly useless. I will only point out to you that the less one loves a woman, the surer one is of possessing her. But this pleasure is worthy of an old 18th-century monkey.’⁷¹ Though he fell violently in love, repeatedly, and at the least excuse, he never forgot that the objects of his passion belonged to a sex of which he held no very high opinion. ‘Women are everywhere the same. Nature, which has given them a subtle mind and the most delicate sensibility, has all but denied them a sense of the beautiful. Poetry glides past their hearing without reaching their soul; they are insensitive to its harmonies; remark how they sing fashionable romances, how they distort the most natural verses, deranging the metre and destroying the rhyme. Listen to their literary opinions, and you will be amazed by the falsity, even coarseness of their understanding … Exceptions are rare.’⁷² The hero of the unfinished A Novel in Letters echoes these views. ‘I have been often astonished by the obtuseness in understanding and the impurity of imagination of ladies who in other respects are extremely amiable. Often they take the most subtle of witticisms, the most poetic of greetings, either as an impudent epigram or a vulgar indecency. In such a case the cold aspect they assume is so appallingly repulsive that the most ardent love cannot withstand it.’⁷³

Pushkin’s first St Petersburg passion was Princess Evdokiya Golitsyna, whom he met at the Karamzins in the autumn of 1817. This thirty-seven-year-old beauty, known, from her habit of never appearing during the day, as the princesse nocturne, had been married in 1799, at the behest of the Emperor Paul and against her wishes, to Prince Sergey Golitsyn. After Paul’s death, however, she was able to leave her husband and lead an independent, if somewhat eccentric life at her house on Bolshaya Millionnaya Street. ‘Black, expressive eyes, thick, dark hair, falling in curling locks on the shoulders, a matte, southern complexion, a kind and gracious smile; add to these an unusually soft and melodious voice and pronunciation – and you will have an approximate understanding of her appearance,’ writes Vyazemsky, one of her admirers. At midnight ‘a small, but select company gathered in this salon: one is inclined to say in this temple, all the more as its hostess could have been taken for the priestess of some pure and elevated cult’.⁷⁴ Here the conversation would continue until three or four in the morning. In later life her eccentricities became more pronounced; in the 1840s she mounted a campaign against the introduction of the potato to Russia, on the grounds that this was an infringement of Russian nationality.

‘The poet Pushkin in our house fell mortally in love with the Pythia Golitsyna and now spends his evenings with her,’ Karamzin wrote to Vyazemsky in December 1817. ‘He lies from love, quarrels from love, but as yet does not write from love. I must admit, I would not have fallen in love with the Pythia: from her tripod spurts not fire, but cold.’^{* 75} For some months he was deeply in love with her. Sending her a copy of ‘Liberty. An Ode’, he accompanied the manuscript with a short verse:

I used to sing of

The splendid dream of Freedom

And breathed it sweetly.

But then I see you, hear you,

And so? … man is weak!

Losing freedom for ever,

I adore captivity with my heart.⁷⁶

But her attractions were purely spiritual; this was an ethereal love devoid of any taint of physicality. Other desires had to be satisfied elsewhere. ‘In the mornings Pushkin tells Zhukovsky where he spent the night without sleep; he spends the entire time paying visits to whores, to me, and to Princess Golitsyna, and in the evenings sometimes plays bank,’ Turgenev noted.⁷⁷ After meeting the princess in Moscow in June 1818, Vasily Pushkin wrote to Vyazemsky: ‘I spent the entire evening with her and we talked much about you. She loves you and respects you. My nephew Aleksandr called on her every day. She gladdened me by saying that he was a very good, very clever young fellow.’⁷⁸ By this time Pushkin’s emotions had begun to cool, and by December the episode was over.

‘Pushkin is possessed,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky on 12 November 1819. ‘I catch a glimpse of him only in the theatre, he looks in there in his free time from the animals. In general his life is spent at the office where one obtains admission tickets to look at the animals that have been brought here, among which the tiger is the most tame. He has fallen in love with the ticket-girl and has become her cavalier servant; meanwhile he is observing the nature of animals and noticing the difference from the swine he sees gratis.’ Vyazemsky’s reply is somewhat cryptic but undoubtedly indecent: ‘Pushkin’s love is surely my friend, who tortured me for a whole night … at a masked ball. Do me a favour and ask him to convey my respects to them; there should be two of them. One lion was in love with her, and when she caressed him, he displayed a leonine sceptre. Does Pushkin know about his rival? However, it’s more difficult getting a man away from a woman than having a tug-of-war with a donkey.’⁷⁹ The girl – she seems to have been called Nastasya – sold tickets for one of the travelling menageries which visited St Petersburg at Easter, Shrove-tide and other times, setting up their booth, alongside others occupied by fortune-tellers, trained canaries, dancing dogs, jugglers, magicians, tight-rope walkers and the like, on Admiralty Square, Theatre Square in front of the Bolshoy, or on Tsaritsyn Field.

He also knew, and admired – but was never in love with – the eighteen-year-old Pole Sofya Potocka, whom he met in 1819. Her family history was an intriguing one. Her mother, Sofya Clavona, was a Greek from Constantinople, who had, it was said, been bought from her mother for 1,500 piastres by the Polish ambassador. As she was journeying to Poland with her protector, at Kamenets-Podolsk in the Ukraine she met Major Joseph Witt, who fell in love with her, married her secretly and took her to Paris. The portraitist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun saw her here in the early 1780s, noting that she ‘was then extremely young and as pretty as it is possible to be, but tolerably vain of her charming face’.⁸⁰ Later Sofya attracted the attention of Potemkin, Catherine’s favourite, who, besotted with her, made her husband a general and a count, took her as his mistress and bestowed on her an estate in the Crimea. In 1788 she became the mistress of General Stanislaw-Felix Potocki, a claimant to the throne of Poland with huge estates in the Ukraine. He paid Witt two million zlotys to divorce her, and married her in 1798, after the death of his wife. He hardly received full value for his money, since she soon began an affair with his son, later living openly with him in Tulchin. Her husband died in 1805, and his son soon afterwards. Her two daughters, Sofya and Olga, rivalled their mother in beauty: Sofya married Pushkin’s friend General Kiselev in 1821, but separated from him in 1829, supposedly on learning that he had had an affair with her sister (who had married General Lev Naryshkin).

Vyazemsky met the Potocki family in Warsaw in October 1819, and immediately succumbed to Sofya’s attractions. ‘With us for a few days longer are Potocka and Sofya, who is as beautiful as Minerva in the hour of lust,’ he informed Turgenev, and a fortnight later wrote: ‘Give my respects to all our acquaintance; and, if you see her and get to know her, – to the sovereign of my imagination, Minerva in the hour of lust, in whom everything is not earthly, apart from the gaze, in which there glows the spark of earthly desire. Happy is he who will fan the spark: in it the fire of poetry glows.’⁸¹ In December Turgenev told Vyazemsky of Pushkin’s new verses; he had written ‘an epistle to a masturbator, and, really, it can be read even by the most bashful … How Sofya’s roses fade, because she allows no one to pick them.’ In January he sent Vyazemsky the poem in question, together with a request for enough striped black velvet to make a waistcoat, since it was unobtainable in St Petersburg. ‘Pushkin’s verses are charming!’ Vyazemsky replied. ‘Did he not write them to my lustful Minerva? They say she deals in that business.’⁸² Vyazemsky was right; the poem, ironically enitled ‘Platonic Love’, was addressed to Sofya Potocka. In 1825, when preparing his verse for publication, Pushkin wrote on the margin of the poem’s manuscript: ‘Not to be included – since I want to be a moral person.’⁸³

* I.e. La Pucelle: the Charites were the daughters of Zeus, goddesses personifying charm, grace and beauty.

* Grisier was a friend of Alexandre Dumas, who mentions him in The Count of Monte Cristo, and based a novel, Le Maître d’armes (3 vols, Paris, 1840–1), on his experiences in St Petersburg.

Duelling had been banned in France from 1566, in England from 1615, and in Russia from 1702. The relevant ukase of Peter the Great runs: ‘Inhabitants of Russia and foreigners residing there shall not engage in duels with any weapon whatsoever, and for this purpose shall not call out anyone nor go out: whosoever having issued a challenge inflicts a wound shall be executed’ (Duel Pushkina s Dantesom-Gekkerenom, 104). However, in all three countries there always had been a very wide gap between ban and enforcement. This was especially true of Russia, where the authorities would usually turn a blind eye to rencontres which did not have a fatal result; in the case of those which ended with the death of one combatant, the fate of the survivor often depended on the arbitrary whim of the tsar. Ivan Annenkov, a lieutenant in the Chevalier Guards, who killed an officer of the Life Guards Hussars in a duel, was, on Alexander’s orders, given the extraordinarily light sentence of three months in the guard-house. And when, in June 1823, General Kiselev, the chief of staff of the Second Army, killed Major-General Mordvinov, Alexander took no action at all: Kiselev remained in his post and underwent no punishment.

* Elizaveta Markovna was related to Praskovya Osipova, the owner of Trigorskoe: her brother, Petr Poltoratsky, had married Ekaterina Vulf, the sister of Praskovya’s first husband, Nikolay Vulf.

* The theatres were also closed from the Monday of the first week of Lent to the Sunday after Easter.

* The phrase is an adaptation of a line in a poem of 1820, ‘Extinguished is the orb of day …’ [‘Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo …’], II, 146.

† The known other members are Sergey Trubetskoy, Fedor Yurev, Dmitry Barkov, Yakov Tolstoy, Aleksandr Tokarev, Ivan Zhadovsky, Aleksandr Ulybyshev, and Prince Dmitry Dolgorukov.

* I.e. Krylova: the Russian for wing is krylo.

* Vyazemsky had almost filial feelings for Karamzin: after his father’s death in 1807 (his mother, an O’Reilly, had died in 1802) Karamzin, whose second wife was Vyazemsky’s illegitimate half-sister, had come to live on the family estate at Ostafevo, near Moscow, and had acted as the young prince’s guardian.

* Pushkin later added a manuscript note to this line: ‘An inaccuracy. Chevalier Guards officers, like other guests, appeared at balls in undress and low shoes. A just remark, but there is something poetic about the spurs’ (VI, 528).

* Pythia was the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, who ‘delivered the answer of the god to such as came to consult the oracle, and was supposed to be suddenly inspired by the sulphureous vapours which issued from the hole of a subterranean cavity within the temple, over which she sat bare on a three-legged stool, called a tripod’ (Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. London, 1984, 539).